


He's In Love With The Boy

by Huntress79



Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Best Friends, Childhood Friends, Friends to Lovers (hinted at), M/M, POV Outsider, Pre-Captain America: The First Avenger, Pre-Serum Steve Rogers, Pre-War
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-08
Updated: 2019-02-08
Packaged: 2019-10-24 05:50:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 822
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17698841
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Huntress79/pseuds/Huntress79
Summary: They say the friendship between Steve Rogers and Bucky Barnes was epic, one for the history books. But one person (at least) knows there was more to it than meets the eye.





	He's In Love With The Boy

**Author's Note:**

  * For [phoenixflight](https://archiveofourown.org/users/phoenixflight/gifts).



> Written for chocolatebox 2019 and the prompt “I really enjoy pre-war fics, or made-it-back-alive 1950s fics. Maybe outsider POV of someone speculating on the nature of their relationship?” Dear phoenixflight, I hope you like what I have created here. To be honest, I had some troubles finding the right setting for it.

From the moment he was born, I knew that the Barnes boy would be a heartbreaker. I’m Alberta Graham, neighbor to the Barnes family here in Brooklyn and Winnie’s midwife with all her children.

Back to James (by the way, the easiest birth out of all of them): he was a calm baby, didn’t make half of the fuss his sisters put us up with during childbirth, but as I said, he was a heartbreaker. The bluest eyes I have seen in my whole life, staring up at you in a way that my Gaelic grandma would call “soul-reading”, even though he wasn’t more than an hour old.

I, of course, kept an eye on the boy, more out of maternal instinct. I was denied children of my own, and with my husband having died a couple of years ago, I knew that this was the only way for me to be close to children of all ages. Out of all the kids in our neighbourhood, James, or “Bucky”, how everyone started to call him pretty soon, was the most charming one.

A couple of years after Bucky’s birth, we all got new neighbors – the Rogers’ moved in two doors down the street, and I got “my” next precious boy. When I first saw Steve, I thought him not older than maybe four or five, but it soon should turn out that he was only a year younger than the Barnes boy. But that poor Steve – according to his mother Sarah, a hard working woman, he already had contracted pretty much every disease a kid could have, among a long list of other ailments. More than once during the winter, I pulled him in from the cold streets, offering him not only a cup of soul-warming tea, but also a shelter from the elements, as he usually was coughing up a storm as soon as the cold winds from the North were starting.

The following March, Bucky turned eight, and a couple of weeks later, he all but came running to my door. “Auntie Bertie”, as most kids in our street used to call me, could be heard, his voice tinged with a mix of excitement and fear. What was going on?

I dropped whatever I was doing at the moment and hurried to the door – only to find Bucky holding a bleeding, unconscious Steve in his arms. As soon as he saw me in the doorway, he pushed past me, displaying a lot of strength for an eight-year-old, carrying the smaller boy to the small settee I had by the window of my living room.

At long last, I pulled out of my stupor, hurrying again through my apartment, this time to the washroom, grabbing some supplies to treat Steve’s wounds. What has happened to him?

Coming back to the living room, I more saw than heard Bucky talking to Steve in hushed tones. He also had procured a handkerchief, trying to clean the other boy’s face with it.

As it turned out, Steve himself was “responsible” for all the small injuries he now had – according to Bucky, he had antagonized a couple of older boys on the school yard, and they retaliated with dragging him into an alley on the way home. Good thing that Bucky followed him, fearing the worst. I only could shake my head about both of them – boys these days!

Funny enough, that incident was enough to form a bond between them that I have never seen before. You could win any bet that when you saw one of them, the other wasn’t far behind. Only in Winter, when the temperatures where way too low, Bucky would be seen alone.

Of course, over the years, boys would slowly turn into men, and once they both hit puberty, you could sense a shift in their relationship, as subtle as it was. And maybe it was also due to the fact that within not only a year, both young men lost a parent that drove them even closer together. By the time Steve was 17, they were sharing an apartment right across the street. In times like these, where everything was becoming more and more expensive by the day, this was something most people considered out of necessity, but I think I knew better. Bucky was smitten with Steve (and vice versa), but society wasn’t ready for them.

Sure, Bucky would charm his way into many a woman’s heart (and break even more doing so), but deep down, I knew that this was more him doing the right thing to prevent his family from disgrace than anything else. And if my eyes didn’t betray me, I saw him and Steve doing more than holding hands in the shelter of the night, as the entrance to their apartment was right across from my bedroom window (and I had bouts of insomnia for pretty much my whole life).

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The End

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End file.
